Tutorials : Stepping through Jakarta Struts :

Stepping through Jakarta Struts

What is Struts?

Struts, from the Jakarta Project, is a development framework for Java servlet applications based upon the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm. The purpose of this article is to give you a quick intro to Struts, covering the necessary details to make it possible to build a simple one-page example containing an HTML form. Then I'll refine this example to show you additional features of Struts. I'll assume that you are familiar with Java servlet programming and the MVC architecture - if not I'd recommend that you read this article from JavaWorld.

- Figure 1: The MVC architecture -

Struts is comprised of a controller servlet, beans and other Java classes, configuration files, and tag libraries. This means that when you have downloaded Struts (and I'll come back to how this is done) you have available:

a controller for your application (the Struts servlet acts as a common controller for the whole application)
a collection of Java beans and other helper classes that you use in the "Model" part of your application
a collection of tag libraries used in your jsp-pages

To glue these things together Struts uses a set of configuration files. Together this gives you the skeleton that you can use to "strut" your application.

Struts has been designed to give you modularity and loose couplings in your application. If you're building a simple, small application you might find it complicated to have to create and handle so many files. You might even be tempted to put all your code in a single jsp-file. My advice to you is: don't do it! I'm sure you can build a single-page application faster using only one jsp-page, but if we're talking about more complex applications, the extra effort put in by using a modular framework will soon be rewarded.

If you hang on I'll guide you through the complete Struts application setup and hopefully show you how each piece fits in.

Our first Struts application

Our first small application will be a page with an HTML form containing all the well-known controls. As you can see I have not tried to make the GUI look nice - we're architects now - not graphical designers:

- Figure 2: The first, simple application -

When we submit this page it should redisplay itself without loosing the data that we have entered. Such an application is always a good first exercise if you want to learn about new tools or technologies.

But before we start building the application we need to download and install Struts.

Step 0: Downloading and installing Struts

Struts is downloaded from the Jakarta Project at http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/. The download address for the current version - 1.0.2 - is http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-struts/release/v1.0.2. The simplest way to install Struts is to copy a small Struts application, packed in "struts-blank.war", from the download file to your Servlet container. If you're using Tomcat and many other servlet containers you place the war-file in the "webapps" folder and you now only need to restart your server and you'll have "struts-blank" running. On Tomcat you can check your installation with this URL: http://localhost:8080/struts-blank/index.jsp. The download contains an "install" file which contains installation tips for several containers.

This should emphasize that Struts can be seen as the core of a normal servlet application - it's not a modification to your servlet container or anything like that.

While picking up the struts-blank application you might as well take and install the "struts-documentation.war" application, which contains a lot of Struts documentation - for example the User Guide.

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